Writing Gender in Women's Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance

Writing Gender in Women's Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance PDF Author: Meredith K. Ray
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802097049
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
During the Italian Renaissance, dozens of early modern writers published collections of private correspondence, using them as vehicles for self-presentation, self-promotion, social critique, and religious dissent. Writing Gender in Women's Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance examines the letter collections of women writers, arguing that these works were a studied performance of pervasive ideas about gender as well as genre, a form of self-fashioning that variously reflected, manipulated, and subverted cultural and literary conventions regarding femininity and masculinity. Meredith K. Ray presents letter collections from authors of diverse backgrounds, including a noblewoman, a courtesan, an actress, a nun, and a male writer who composed letters under female pseudonyms. Ray's study includes extensive new archival research and highlights a widespread interest in women's letter collections during the Italian Renaissance that suggests a deep curiosity about the female experience and a surprising openness to women's participation in this kind of literary production.

Writing Gender in Women's Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance

Writing Gender in Women's Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance PDF Author: Meredith K. Ray
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802097049
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 377

Get Book Here

Book Description
During the Italian Renaissance, dozens of early modern writers published collections of private correspondence, using them as vehicles for self-presentation, self-promotion, social critique, and religious dissent. Writing Gender in Women's Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance examines the letter collections of women writers, arguing that these works were a studied performance of pervasive ideas about gender as well as genre, a form of self-fashioning that variously reflected, manipulated, and subverted cultural and literary conventions regarding femininity and masculinity. Meredith K. Ray presents letter collections from authors of diverse backgrounds, including a noblewoman, a courtesan, an actress, a nun, and a male writer who composed letters under female pseudonyms. Ray's study includes extensive new archival research and highlights a widespread interest in women's letter collections during the Italian Renaissance that suggests a deep curiosity about the female experience and a surprising openness to women's participation in this kind of literary production.

Gender and Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Culture

Gender and Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Culture PDF Author: Kathleen P. Long
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131713057X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
In the wake of new interest in alchemy as more significant than a bizarre aberration in rational Western European culture, this collection examines both alchemical and medical discourses in the larger context of early modern Europe. How do early scientific discourses infiltrate other cultural domains such as literature, philosophy, court life, and the conduct of households? How do these new contexts deflect scientific pursuits into new directions, and allow a larger participation in the elaboration of scientific methods and perspectives? Might there have been a scientific subculture, particularly surrounding alchemy, which allowed women to participate in scientific pursuits long before they were admitted in an investigative capacity into official academic settings? This volume poses those questions, as a starting point for a broader discussion of scientific subcultures and their relationship to the restructuring and questioning of gender roles.

Provenance and Possession

Provenance and Possession PDF Author: K. J. P. Lowe
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691246890
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
A thought-provoking study of how knowledge of provenance was not transferred with enslaved people and goods from the Portuguese trading empire to Renaissance Italy In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Renaissance Italy received a bounty of "goods" from Portuguese trading voyages—fruits of empire that included luxury goods, exotic animals and even enslaved people. Many historians hold that this imperial "opening up" of the world transformed the way Europeans understood the global. In this book, K.J.P. Lowe challenges such an assumption, showing that Italians of this era cared more about the possession than the provenance of their newly acquired global goods. With three detailed case studies involving Florence and Rome, and drawing on unpublished archival material, Lowe documents the myriad occasions on which global knowledge became dissociated from overseas objects, animals and people. Fundamental aspects of these imperial imports, including place of origin and provenance, she shows, failed to survive the voyage and make landfall in Europe. Lowe suggests that there were compelling reasons for not knowing or caring about provenance, and concludes that geographical knowledge, like all knowledge, was often restricted and not valued. Examining such documents as ledger entries, journals and public and private correspondence as well as extant objects, and asking previously unasked questions, Lowe meticulously reconstructs the backstories of Portuguese imperial acquisitions, painstakingly supplying the context. She chronicles the phenomenon of mixed-ancestry children at Florence’s foundling hospital; the ownership of inanimate luxury goods, notably those possessed by the Medicis; and the acquisition of enslaved people and animals. How and where goods were acquired, Lowe argues, were of no interest to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italians; possession was paramount.

Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy

Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy PDF Author: Eugenia Paulicelli
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134787103
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 510

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Book Description
The first comprehensive study on the role of Italian fashion and Italian literature, this book analyzes clothing and fashion as described and represented in literary texts and costume books in the Italy of the 16th and 17th centuries. Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy emphasizes the centrality of Italian literature and culture for understanding modern theories of fashion and gauging its impact in the shaping of codes of civility and taste in Europe and the West. Using literature to uncover what has been called the ’animatedness of clothing,’ author Eugenia Paulicelli explores the political meanings that clothing produces in public space. At the core of the book is the idea that the texts examined here act as maps that, first, pinpoint the establishment of fashion as a social institution of modernity; and, second, gauge the meaning of clothing at a personal and a political level. As well as Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier and Cesare Vecellio’s The Clothing of the Renaissance World, the author looks at works by Italian writers whose books are not yet available in English translation, such as those by Giacomo Franco, Arcangela Tarabotti, and Agostino Lampugnani. Paying particular attention to literature and the relevance of clothing in the shaping of codes of civility and style, this volume complements the existing and important works on Italian fashion and material culture in the Renaissance. It makes the case for the centrality of Italian literature and the interconnectedness of texts from a variety of genres for an understanding of the history of Italian style, and serves to contextualize the debate on dress in other European literatures.

Redreaming the Renaissance

Redreaming the Renaissance PDF Author: Mary Lindemann
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1644533383
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Redreaming the Renaissance seeks to remedy the dearth of conversations between scholars of history and literary studies by building on the pathbreaking work of Guido Ruggiero to explore the cross-fertilization between these two disciplines, using the textual world of the Italian Renaissance as proving ground. In this volume, these disciplines blur, as they did for early moderns, who did not always distinguish between the historical and literary significance of the texts they read and produced. Literature here is broadly conceived to include not only belles lettres, but also other forms of artful writing that flourished in the period, including philosophical writings on dreams and prophecy; life-writing; religious debates; menu descriptions and other food writing; diaries, news reports, ballads, and protest songs; and scientific discussions. The twelve essays in this collection examine the role that the volume’s dedicatee has played in bringing the disciplines of history and literary studies into provocative conversation, as well as the methodology needed to sustain and enrich this conversation.

Music, Myth and Story in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Music, Myth and Story in Medieval and Early Modern Culture PDF Author: Katherine Butler
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783273712
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
The complex relationship between myths and music is here investigated.

Daughters of Alchemy

Daughters of Alchemy PDF Author: Meredith K. Ray
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674504232
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Meredith Ray shows that women were at the vanguard of empirical culture during the Scientific Revolution. They experimented with medicine and alchemy at home and in court, debated cosmological discoveries in salons and academies, and in their writings used their knowledge of natural philosophy to argue for women’s intellectual equality to men.

Women and the Circulation of Texts in Renaissance Italy

Women and the Circulation of Texts in Renaissance Italy PDF Author: Brian Richardson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108477690
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
The first comprehensive guide to women's promotion and use of textual culture, in manuscript and print, in Renaissance Italy.

Poetry and Censorship in Counter-Reformation Italy

Poetry and Censorship in Counter-Reformation Italy PDF Author: Jennifer Helm
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004301119
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
In Poetry and Censorship Jennifer Helm offers insight into motives and strategies of Counter-Reformation censorship of poetry in Italy. Materials of Roman censorial authorities reveal why the control of poetry and of its reception was crucial to Counter-Reformation cultural politics. Censorship of poetry should enable the church to influence human inner life that ---from thought and belief to fantasy and feeling--- was evolving considerably at that time. The control of poetic genres and modes of writing played an important part here. Yet, to what extent censorship could affect poetic creation emerges from a manuscript of the Venetian poet Domenico Venier. The materials suggest the impact of Counter-Reformation censorship on poetry began earlier and was more extensive than has yet been propagated.

Postal Culture

Postal Culture PDF Author: Gabriella Romani
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442667257
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
The nationalization of the postal service in Italy transformed post-unification letter writing as a cultural medium. Both a harbinger of progress and an expanded, more efficient means of circulating information, the national postal service served as a bridge between the private world of personal communication and the public arena of information exchange and production of public opinion. As a growing number of people read and wrote letters, they became part of a larger community that regarded the letter not only as an important channel in the process of information exchange, but also as a necessary instrument in the education and modernization of the nation. In Postal Culture, Gabriella Romani examines the role of the letter in Italian literature, cultural production, communication, and politics. She argues that the reading and writing of letters, along with epistolary fiction, epistolary manuals, and correspondence published in newspapers, fostered a sense of community and national identity and thus became a force for social change.